Familiar Stranger

I have known his face for thirty years, we grew up on one block,
we rode the same school bus, attended the same clock
of morning, shared the same American dull stretch of years,
and now I look at him and feel the chill that sears.

I know every fact that maps to who he is, the history,
the photographs, the lost-touch gaps, the residual mystery
of reunion, but the face no longer carries any weight,
it sits there meaning nothing, past my ability to translate.

Familiar stranger, I know all your vital signs,
familiar stranger, I have memorized your lines,
but something in the circuit that should fire when I see you
is doing something different now and I cannot tell who is new.

I read about the syndrome, there is a documented case
of disconnection in the wire that processes a face,
the recognition system and the feeling system sever,
and a loved one becomes accurate and strange forever.

Mine is not that clinical, it comes and goes in waves,
sometimes the face resolves and carries all the days
of shared history behind it, and sometimes it is a stranger
wearing all his information, living in his manger.

He is talking to me now about his kid, his car, his street,
and I am assembling responses from a database complete
of what I know about this person and what would be right,
and he laughs and I laugh
and the stranger wears his face all night.

The horror is not fear but the plain
absence of the recognition that should ease the strain
of being with another human, the warmth that should arrive,
I am cataloguing facts about a man and he is alive.